


armed with the past and the will

by whimsicalimages



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, Gen, Heroine's Journey, Multi, OT4 (implied) - Freeform, Screw Destiny, Swordfighting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 20:41:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10749423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicalimages/pseuds/whimsicalimages
Summary: The language of winning and losing, this language that men favor – Madi can speak this language, though she disagrees with its precepts. Success takes different forms, and failing once does not mean failing forever. It does not even mean failing the next time.





	armed with the past and the will

**Author's Note:**

> As it turns out, I'm still extremely emotional about Madi, and also about the idea of her learning how to swordfight. Title from Frightened Rabbit's ["Good Arms vs Bad Arms,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBTuyF1T7zA) which is an extremely Madi-post-finale song ( _I am armed with the past and the will and a brick // I am still in love with you, can't admit it yet_ ). Thanks, as always, to [A](https://hellaarabella.tumblr.com) for listening to me yell. Also thanks to my rusty political philosophy knowledge of Thucydides; I doubt my freshman year professors could have predicted I would use their teachings this way, five years later.

“I want you to teach me how to fight,” she tells Julius, coming up behind him where he sits towards the back of the big hall.

He barely startles from where he is sharpening a knife, hands stilling for only a moment in their motion before continuing. “Why?” he asks.

There are other people in the area, but they have all retreated to give Madi privacy. She gets more pitying looks, now, but she has also become more skilled at wielding the power granted by the respectful ones. “When we were fighting for Nassau, I was captured, and was able to do very little about it,” she says. “I do not want to ever again be so helpless.”

“Why me? I am not the best sword-fighter in this camp.”

“You are the best tactician,” she says. “Is that not what matters in a fight?”

“Why not him?” Julius asks, still watching the shine of his blade. “Your pirate. Silver. He is a capable swordsman, and not a bad strategist.”

 _Because if I get near him with a sword right now, I will be too tempted to do irreparable harm,_ Madi does not say. _Because if we want this community to survive and not split into factions, you and I will need to overcome our differences, and perhaps this will make you feel like you belong among us. Because by the time I could learn, I no longer had a father who could teach me._ “Because I am asking you,” she says.

He finally looks up at her, studying the set of her jaw. She can only know what she wants him to see – steel, and nothing else. “Very well,” he says. “We can begin tomorrow. I can find you a sword.”

-

They find an open space not too far from the camp for their lessons – two hours a day. She would suggest the bluffs on the leeward side of the island, but she knows that Silver has been going there to stare off into the sea and wallow in his regrets. Perhaps, she thinks grimly, it will do him some good.

For the first few days, it is exhausting. But she is determined. _I cannot feel weak. I cannot be weak_ , she remembers, and ignores the sweat making its way down her face in rivulets. Thrust, parry, retreat, parry, thrust.

She thinks part of the reason that Julius has set such a punishing pace is to test her, but if she plans on beating anyone else, she must first beat him, so she is at peace with that.

Julius, she suspects, may not be.

“They say that there is a woman on Rackham’s pirate crew who fights better than any man,” Julius says on the third day. “You could ask her to teach you how to use your disadvantage in size.”

“There is no better instructor than experience,” Madi replies serenely, ignoring the soreness in her arms. “And I think she is rather busy on the account.”

“You have friends in Nassau,” Julius says. “You could find her, if you wanted to.”

“I could, but I have already asked you.”

He stops this line of questioning, and their blades continue to meet. Madi tries to lose herself in the motions.

-

On the eighth day, he tries again, with a more philosophical approach. “Why learn violence when you have known peace? Should violence not be left to the men who are already steeped in it?”

“Violence and peace meet on unequal terms,” Madi says. “To keep peace, the ability to threaten violence is necessary. And I do not want to be captured by men with no respect for peace at all; I do not want to be captured by anyone. ‘The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.’ I would rather be strong.”

“A dire treatise to quote, for a woman who planned to wage war against an empire,” Julius replies, dry as dust as he slips under her guard and ghosts his blade past where her neck meets her shoulder. She fights the urge to curse and stamp her feet like a child. The only remedies are practice and patience, and she has willpower enough for both. “Again. We would have been the weak ones, and our people would have suffered the most for it.”

“By the time the war began in earnest, we would have been the stronger party,” Madi says. “Any man will fight when his freedom is at stake. Smaller sacrifices, time and property and money, become easier, if not easy outright. Had we taken Nassau and kept it, we could have gathered the numbers necessary.”

“How? England has and will always have numbers we could not hope to match, men and powder and ships we could not hope to match. We would have been crushed within a year at most.”

Madi steps to the edge of their circle and puts her left hand behind her back, raising her sword. If she says what she believes to be true – _the greatest military mind I have ever seen could have made up for many deficits_ – she knows that Julius will laugh at her.

“Perhaps,” she says instead, carefully parrying. Thrust, step forward, parry, parry. “But we would have laid better groundwork for those who will come after us, rather than a foundation of sand that has already washed away. We would have readied history for those who will defeat England. All empires must fall eventually, and we would have struck the first blow.”

“I think England has many years left,” Julius responds, and begins to press his advantage.

-

On the twenty-first day, Madi watches the trees sway while she and Julius are sitting and catching their breath, passing a skein of water back and forth. It will be storm season soon.

She wonders if the hurricanes travel as far north as Georgia. As far inland as that place. Do they prepare like the islanders do, finding the high ground where they can wait out the floods? Do they know how to survive the winds, how to build sturdy shelters? If they have been there for years, surely they have some experience with the wrath of nature in the new world.

“What occupies your mind today, Queen Madi?” Julius asks, pulling her out of her thoughts.

She blinks, realizes she has been sweeping her thumb across the curved part of her necklace absently, and lets it go. “I think that is the first time you have called me that,” she says. “You know that you do not have to.”

“I have decided that I respect you,” Julius says. “Even though I still sometimes think you are as foolish as Captain Flint was, I respect you enough that I would follow you.”

That will have to be enough for now. It is what she has been working towards, but still, the honorific carves something strange and hollow in her chest. “You can respect me and still call me Madi.”

“Very well,” he says, finishing off the water when she hands it to him. “What occupies your mind today, Madi?”

The number of slave ships passing through Port Royal every month. The small islands off the coast of Georgia and the native tribes that inhabit them. Their own tenuous supply lines to Nassau. An unfortunately large quantity of thoughts debating how best to convince John Silver that there is always redemption to be found, if one looks in the right places.

“I thought that I knew most of what I needed to know to be a good leader for our people, but in the past months I have realized that there is always going to be more I must learn,” she says, instead of saying any of that. “The world is far bigger than the world that I knew. The truths are more malleable – more sand than stone. Any story can be rewritten.”

“Only if you are in a position to be the writer.”

“Yes,” she agrees, turning to look at him. “I plan on being in that position from now on.”

Julius raises an eyebrow, sighs, and stands. “Well,” he says, offering her a hand up. “Then I’d best help you prepare. One more round, then we will be finished for today.”

-

On the thirty-sixth day, Madi bests Julius three times in a row.

“I think,” he says, carefully stepping away from her sword, “I have taught you as much as I can.”

“Do not be ashamed,” she says archly. “I am twenty years younger than you.”

Julius snorts. “It seems the time has finally come for the fight you’ve really been preparing for.”

“And what fight is that?”

He points a thumb in the direction of the cliffs. “The one with your pirate, which you believe you can win with a sword, where you lost with your words.”

The language of winning and losing, this language that men favor – she can speak this language, though she disagrees with its precepts. Success takes different forms, and failing once does not mean failing forever. It does not even mean failing the next time. “I believe I can win with a sword where my words would go ignored,” she corrects.

“If your words can be ignored, then you have already lost,” Julius says.

“Perhaps,” she says. “But I cannot allow that to dissuade me from the attempt. Some battles are worth fighting even if they are unlikely to result in complete victory.”

Julius hums. “Protecting who you can for as long as you can is victory enough for me,” he says, wrapping his sword and beginning the walk back to camp. “But I hope that you can earn whatever victory it is that you are seeking.”

“Julius,” she calls after him, then hesitates. He stops, turning his head slightly. She inhales, letting the damp-earth smell of the forest center her, and continues, “My father would have liked you.”

She can see a slight smile on his face before he turns away.

-

Silver stands when he notices her, and she makes her way to him in silence. The surf washes relentlessly in, and the sky is open and cloudless. It really is a beautiful view – months ago, James Flint stood here and saw past the horizon, to a future they never managed to reach.

Now, she can still see a few futures that look bright.

She unwraps the cloth from the two swords she has brought, and holds one out to Silver, hilt-first. He blinks at her, but takes the sword.

“What is this?” Silver asks.

“Julius has been teaching me how to fight,” Madi says.

“I could have taught you,” Silver says, brow furrowed. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

“I did not want you to teach me,” Madi says. “I want you to fight me. Best two of three matches, and the victor shall decide our path.”

“ _Our_ path?” Silver asks, emphasizing the collective.

She sees the desperate hope in his eyes and pushes down the instinctive sigh that threatens to emerge. Men are, on the whole, impossible. “You are not forgiven,” she starts.

He raises his hands, placating. “I wasn’t expecting to be, yet,” he says.

“You are not forgiven,” she repeats. “I still wish you had not done what you did. I still wish you did not sell our happiness for an uncertain outcome, one determined by you alone.” _I wish you knew how to love us both and how to trust that the world would not have doomed us so cruelly. I wish you could see that the same story you rewrote is yet unfinished, and we can write a better ending together,_ she does not say.

Silver opens his mouth, and then thinks better and closes it after she narrows her eyes. “But if I choose to believe you, if I trust your claim that you have ensured we are all alive today, I find myself neither able nor willing to hate you for that. Some roads are now closed to us, but not all the ones remaining are dark,” she says, and pauses. She is tired of being angry – she will choose this moment to begin relearning kindness, so that it is left when the anger fades. “I would consider walking them with you.”

“That’s quite a step up from rage,” Silver says, mustering a small smile. “Why the swordfighting, then?”

“I _am_ still furious with you,” Madi says, and steps back. “And I know that you will not listen to reason, so this is my solution.”

Silver tilts his head. “Your solution. And what shape have you decided you want our tomorrows to be?” he asks, and immediately looks aghast at his own words.

“I suppose you will find out if you lose,” Madi says, and raises her sword. 

He knows better than to ask if she’s serious, though the question is clearly painted on his face. He settles into a defensive position, and neatly bats away her first two strikes. He makes no move of his own.

“You are not attacking me,” she says.

“Should I be?” Silver asks, half-smirking. This, she thinks, is the Silver that Flint had told her about, in the house in Nassau before it had burned. Silver, the infuriating storyteller, who had been subsumed by the Silver who bore the weight of the crown. She will have to come to terms with the fact that they are one and the same.

She tries another three rapid strikes, and then feints and manages to touch the tip of her blade to the center of his chest. He freezes.

“First bout to me,” she says. “Try harder.”

“I don’t want to fight you,” Silver says, and steps back.

“Then you have already lost,” she says. “If it will help you, think of it as teaching me something new.”

He frowns, but doesn’t say anything. He is only now learning the value of silence.

“Again, then,” Madi says, and steps towards him. Thrust, parry, parry, retreat, parry, thrust, parry. He is making more of an effort, now.

There are no thoughts in her mind but the clang of steel, and the distant notion that it would be very difficult to fight multiple people at once. It requires a great deal of concentration to fight even one opponent – in a graceful motion, Silver twists her blade away and gets his sword to her throat.

“Second to you,” Madi says. She can feel the point of the blade hovering over her skin before Silver hastily moves it away. Perhaps they are well-matched in this, too. “One more.”

“We don’t need to do this,” Silver says. “Just tell me what you want. You know I’ll follow you down any path you choose.”

“We need to do this,” Madi says.

Silver sighs, and looks away from her eyes, out to sea. She thinks she knows where he is looking. Who he is trying to see. “I don’t know about teaching you anything new, since Julius seems to have been a good enough tutor, but I can give you some of the wisdom Flint gave me, whatever that’s worth,” Silver says.

 _Whatever that’s worth,_ as if it’s worthless to him. He is a fool, and for the briefest moment she wishes she could unlove him, could put the sun back in its box, could forget the tide. Then it passes. She will win this final match and drag him with her into one of those futures she sees. She will remold the sand of the world to do it. That is the only true possibility she can countenance. “It would be worth a great deal to me,” she says, soft.

Silver looks back at her, and there is a moment where she can see into the wounded core of him before the unreadable mask returns. “He was a better teacher than I, of course. More patient than I thought he was capable of, at the time. More encouraging when I lost and kept losing. He told me once, when we were sparring here, that your opponent’s wrist is where the attack comes from – its past tense – and the blade is its present,” he says, stepping back and raising his sword again. “That they are equally undeniable. I suppose I never managed to understand what he meant by that.”

“Again, then,” Madi says, coiling into position.

They cross blades. Parry, thrust, advance, parry, parry.

“I think, perhaps,” Madi says, as she turns over the words and advances on Silver, “he simply meant that the past and present form one motion.”

She can almost hear Flint’s voice on the wind – _the entire arc of the sword is determined by your grip. If you watch the wrist and the blade simultaneously, you see your opponent’s attack before it comes near you, in the split-second of difference you need to gain the upper hand._ He never said those things to her, but she has a vivid imagination, and conjures him easily. She watches the turn of Silver’s wrist, the flash of the sword in the air. Parry, parry, retreat, thrust, parry, advance.

“He did say something about watching two points in space at once,” Silver agrees, and then goes pale and drops his sword a few inches. Madi sees the opening and seizes it, shifting quickly until her sword is poised just at his neck.

“Oh my god,” Silver says, faintly. “I’m a fucking idiot.”

“Yes,” Madi says.

“I’m a fucking idiot,” he says again, “and this feels awfully familiar.”

“Third to me,” Madi says, withdrawing her blade. “I win.”

“Madi,” Silver says. “That’s what he was trying to say. He didn’t even care that he was teaching me to fight him, that didn’t matter to him at all, he trusted me enough, but the whole time he was trying to tell me something and I was too much of a moron to hear it. He was awake, that nightmare had already faded, he told me I’d opened the door and I had no idea what he was talking about. The man I knew, the man I saw when I delivered him to Savannah, I knew they were the same, but he was saying – he was saying he–”

“Yes,” Madi says again. She takes the sword from his shaking hand, presses her palm to his cheek. His eyes are wet, and she feels an odd, sympathetic pain in her chest.

No, she will never be able to unlove this foolish, stupid man. But she may be able to change the world enough that such a love can survive in it.

“Madi,” he repeats, voice breaking. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she says.

-

When she wakes up the next morning and goes to see her mother, the Queen is looking out at their small lake, her hands clasped behind her back.

“Is your path clear?” she asks, not looking at Madi.

That quiet power – Madi has never been able to use it quite so gracefully. Like all the children raised here, she thinks, she is ever striving to live up to the fate she has been gifted by her parents. “As clear as it can be,” Madi replies.

Her mother is silent for a few moments, before turning to her and brushing her knuckles against Madi’s cheek. “You are your father’s daughter as much as mine,” she says. “You think you can will the outcome you want into happening, but it may not be so easy to bend the world to your hope. What if the people of Ossabaw are hostile? What if you cannot find your other two white men, or if they do not want to be found?”

What if she is not Odysseus, but Penelope after all, consigned to doing what she can on this small island as she waits for a life that will never return? What if she can never carve out the happiness that John Silver sacrificed? No. She cannot and will not accept that. “I do not need to will the outcome I want into being,” she says. “I only need to walk the path as it is laid before me, and it will bring me to the place I need to be.”

The ghost of a smile crosses over her mother’s face. “Perhaps more my daughter, after all,” she says.

Madi presses a kiss to her cheek. “You have taught me everything I know,” she says. “You know that.”

“Almost everything,” her mother says, wry. “Julius seems to have taught you to use a sword as a pirate does.”

Madi raises her eyebrows. “I am sure that if you asked, he would teach you as well,” she says.

Her mother makes a face at her. “I am far too old for that,” her mother, who has lived all of 50 years on this earth, says. “I wish you luck on your path, so that your feet will not lead you astray.”

“Thank you,” Madi says. “I will return as soon as I can secure a place for us on Ossabaw, or the surrounding islands.”

Her mother nods, and Madi presses their foreheads together briefly, before turning to leave.

“Madi,” her mother says quietly, and Madi looks back in time to see her eyes crinkle with joy. “I am so proud of you.”

-

Near Savannah, there is a knock at the door of a small cottage. James Flint opens his eyes as he rolls out of the bed he shares, and goes to let the light in.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope y'all enjoyed! Come find me and yell @ me about Black Sails on [tumblr](https://keensers.tumblr.com).


End file.
